7

Always Me

“Would you like a cup of tea, Darling?”

“Thank you, but Clarke and I must go and kill that dragon! The rotten thing has returned to burn up the garden.”

“Don’t be too long. I’ll just sweep out the living room in the meantime.”

The two boys flew out of the jungle-gym, running furiously towards their destiny. Sticks in hand they eventually slew the monster, amidst the dust of the dry grass, and safely returned to their ladies in their magical castle. There, before they sallied forth on another Holy Crusade, the boys were treated to a make-believe banquet, fit for the nobility in this kingdom by the sea. Two knights errand, resplendent in their panoply, rescuing damsels and fighting terrible foes, were always victorious against the odds.

What glories exist in the mind of any child? Helen and Linda, Clarke and Lyndon were the children of the sea. Throughout their formative years, they played together and grew up in each other’s company.

“Would you like a cup of tea, Darling?” Sixteen years later Helen enquired of her husband.

“Yes please. Make it black, with two!”

“I remain obedient to your command, oh mighty lord.”

“You’re a cheeky kitchen wench!” His Lordship laughed aloud. “And don’t forget to stir it this time!”

Helen returned with the silver tea-service and began to pour strong brown tea into thin china cups. A year had passed since they were married and their mutual love could be seen in the depths of their eyes. They had just arisen and were still clad in the skimpiest of night attire when one of Helen’s milky breasts escaped the confines of her night attire. The morning was cool and the erect nipple immediately attracted Lyndon’s notice, hypnotically reminding him of the upright navigational beacons in the river.”Come here, Sweetheart,” Lyndon raised his hand to capture his passing bride.

“Oh no, don’t chastise me again, Darling!” Helen giggled quietly as her husband lightly smacked her on her silky bottom.

“It must be the salt air. I seem to feel totally reinvigorated.”

“Yes, but it’s only been half an hour!”

“That long! It seems like an eternity. How time flies?”

The two embraced in Poseidon’s sitting room before progressing to more fervent manoeuvres. The morning belonged to them. Indeed, the whole cove was their domain. The hot summer sun was by now streaming through the curtains which flowed in the breeze as majestically as the long, wide river beyond. Mr. Williams had told his son that Poseidon House was to be sold, so this was to be the last holiday they would have in it. Yet, for the time being, it was not the prospect of the house’s sale that was preoccupying the newlyweds.

Their truth was measured in the pounding of a heartbeat, not by the days or months printed on a calendar. Their being existed on a different plane, and one not so easily defined that could be rationally or physically explained. In this reality they appeared to all about them, as substance, as the tangible, but their world existed within the intangible…within the ethereal.

“What should we do now?”

“Let’s visit the Plantation? We haven’t been there for years.”

“The Plantation it is, after concluding our business at hand, of course!”

“Of course we must…naturally!”

At the fork in the road at the Toubli junction, the gold Monaro turned north and cruised towards Cooram. Its occupants chattered and made plans for the day and beyond. There was no urgency. The couple lived within the state of their being, and equally beyond it. Their world, a micro cosmos within the greater Flux, shared in all understanding, and hope and innocence.

Eye to eye and hand in hand they sat, sometimes talking, sometimes not. There transpired between them a reciprocality of thought without demand or obligation from either party…obligation without objection. It was a time of great confidences and predications of discovery, when sharing a secret was as important as acquiring all the gold in the world.

“How far is it now, Lyndon?”

“There’s only about three miles to go. The Plantation is situated on the way to Gilwarren.”

“I knew we couldn’t be too far away. The countryside is changing.”

“Yes, less blue coast and more green hills. They are beautiful and so lush after the rain.”

“Nearly so green as our island!”

“But not nearly as special!”

The gold Monaro sped on.

From out of the distance, a huge fibre glass pineapple, much larger than the biggest cove-house, loomed steadily into perspective. With its external observation platform, the structure appeared in the mind’s eye like a great medieval stronghold surveying its fiefdom. Surrounding it lay a plantation of one hundred acres of the most delicious pineapple imaginable. The establishment offered all kinds of exhibits, amusement rides, a miniature railway, souvenirs, and most importantly, delicious meals and fruit parfaits. For any adventurer, this tourist Mecca appeared an almost surreal kingdom.

What a wonderful location to be shipwrecked in!

“That will be four dollars, sir.”

“Here’s a five-a.”

“Thank you and one dollar change. Enjoy your visit. Don’t forget to take a trip on the plantation train.”

“Good, is it?”

“It’s the highlight of the tour, sir.”

As the attendant smirked, Lyndon paid the princely admittance and received two chrome plated entry tokens. They bore a representation of the giant pineapple on the obverse and the words, ADULT ENTRY, on the reverse. Hand in hand the newly-weds squeezed through the turnstile but expending only one of the tokens.

“What are you going to do with that one?”

“What, with this shiny thing?”

“Are you going to keep it?” Helen chirped amusingly.

“I’ll wait until I’m ninety-eight and come back to buy you a mango parfait. Free admission of course.”

“How terribly romantic you are. You’ve surprised me Darling…I expected to wait until I turned the century.”

“Don’t be silly, I’m going to dump you when you’re ninety-nine!”

“Blessed are the gods that one should live in so much hope in just one lifetime!”

“…And so many people say that romance is dead!”

It was a wonderful cerulean day. The perfect weather complimented the beautiful landscape where neat rows of pineapples stood to attention, reminiscent of soldiers on parade. Not a single plant disobeyed the imposed order of things. Their glistening crowns of ripening green fronds thrived in the warmth of the yellow sun.

Beyond the cultivated artifice of man, large stands of eucalypt and ironbark grew prolifically. One enormous, uniform canopy of grey-green flurried in the strong winds which blew in from the nearby sea. Blue sky, made vast by its self-imposed spectacle of colour, dominated the imagination…nearly as blue as the cobalt in Helen’s eyes…

…And nearly as blue as Poseidon’s restless ocean…

Lyndon held his sweetheart by the shoulder which was soft and malleable to the touch. Carried away by the spontaneity of the moment as they walked towards the train, he turned and kissed her. It was then, when utopia seemed the norm, when total peace permeated from their happy faces, that they were confronted by a preposterous reminder of an earlier time.

“Hi, Hel…!” The rough, primal monotone barked across the railway platform. “I ain’t seen ya for years.”

The couple shuddered in utter disbelief.

“Why, Graham Barnes! Hello.” Helen was first to respond to his greeting.

“Who’s that then?” Barnes squinted at the vaguely familiar figure.

“Don’t you recognize me? I’m your old mate, Lyndon!”

“S#@*, well what’d ya know? You’re Clarkie’s poofy mate!”

“You’re partly correct, Barnes. I’m Clarke’s mate, but despite your party line, I’m no poof.”

Barnes struggled to understand Lyndon’s double-negatives.

“You ain’t ever been a mate of mine, well!”

“Thanks for stating the apparent.” Lyndon laughed audibly, seemingly unmoved by Barnes’ botched attempt to insult him.

“What did ya say?”

“I said…why don’t you try teaching your grandmother to suck eggs instead of swimming out of your depth? I’m saying that it would make it a whole lot easier for you.”

Barnes stood motionless, blankly reviewing the response, still trying to comprehend the status quo, although in the end it just proved too difficult for him.

“I ain’t got no grandmother, stupid!”

“That’s not what I meant.” Lyndon shook his head in disbelief. “I should have known!”

Barnes spat abruptly onto the pavement and raised his left leg to release a flatulent reply.

“So what’s this then? Yo u and him ain’t going out, now?”

“We are, actually…and as to the other question, the authorities call it a marriage.” Lyndon raised Helen’s hand and displayed the wedding ring.

“Youse two really married?”

“Yep…sure are…last Saturday marked our first anniversary as a matter of fact, but we still feel we are on our honeymoon.”

Helen nodded in agreement.

“Well, stuff me like an olive!” Barnes was overcome and belched in disbelief.

“Now there’s a charming conversation point, Barnes.”

Other customers, standing in two neat rows behind the gate and party to Barnes’ comments, had started filling the platform. The reluctant engineer now readied himself and disengaged his conversation with his long lost ‘friends.’

“All aboard! All aboard! No time to talk to youse lot! Hurry along and board the train or I’ll go without ya.” He snorted contemptuously at an unfortunate customer.

“Well, if it isn’t Barnes, the bard and poet, who, so obsessed with burping that he didn’t quite know it!” Lyndon responded stridently.

“Shut ya stupid gob!”

“Now, now, boys…Let’s all be friends?”

The Barnes Neanderthal, who was obliged to attend to his duties at last, planted himself firmly on the driver’s seat. With two tugs of the steam whistle, and a shunt of the carriages, the little engine pulled slowly away from the platform. Barnes the engineer, in total control, was completely immersed in his own world. The engine pulled a dozen half-empty carriages, and the driver blew the whistle with a monotonous frequency.

…I think I can, I think I can! Here, Puff the little red engine tried as hard as a locomotive could to traverse the obstacles of topography which lay ahead!

In the meantime, the two sweethearts sat unaccompanied in the car directly behind the engineer. From there Lyndon could clearly make out the primitive Barnes ape, peering into his mirror, miming obscene words through his silent, parting lips.

The small train laboriously crawled along the uneven steel tracks skirting the perimeter of the plantation, rattling and groaning as a recorded cassette endorsed the journey’s highlights for the amusement of the mildly interested passengers. All the while Barnes did not break eye contact with the pair. His contorted face seethed with hatred as the miniscule train laboured around the perimeter and eventually returned to its starting point. There the disenchanted passengers finally disembarked.

Surprisingly, Barnes at this instant presented himself to the couple.

“I suppose I should congratulate youse…getting hitched and all that. No hard feelings, squab!”

“None taken, I suppose, Barnes.”

“Thank you, Graham.” Helen leaned towards him and pecked his cheek. Barnes was so impressed that his hard exterior softened just enough to allow his eyes to mist over. “We really do appreciate your well wishes.”

“Well, I suppose if ya put it that way…”

Lyndon then shook Barnes’ greasy paw but old habits die hard. Even now, Barnes tried to hurt him by squeezing it as tightly as he could.

“Barnes, let’s have enough of that, for goodness sake!”

“I’m still a better capt’n than you, arse h#*e.”

“Whatever spins your wheel?”

“Outsail ya any day of the week, too!”

“Yes, I know, except on those days ending with a Y.”

“See, you agreed with me. I knew you would!”

Helen looked confusingly at her husband. Could Barnes be so thick as to have missed even this quip?

“I think one of us has to see, even if the other can’t.” Lyndon commented dryly.

Barnes now raised his cap in mocked salute, confident that he had won the argument, long lost. The poor dumb shit! Meanwhile, a score of passengers had begun to queue for the next train ride so Barnes hurried himself away and took his place by the engine.

“…All aboard…come along, all aboard. Come on, move along.”

With one long, last look at Helen, Barnes weakened a little and again tipped his cap to his one-time want-to-be girl friend.

“See ya, darling girl!”

“Goodbye, Graham Barnes.” Helen responded too-kindly with the sweetest chirp of a lark, and hugged him like a long lost friend.

“Goodbye, Barnes!” Lyndon offered much less endorsement as the engineer wiped his nose.

“See you later, loser!”

“Not unless we see you first.”

The engineer took his seat and when the engine pulled away Barnes lifted two fingers in a final salute. It seemed little had changed since his childhood. With his plastic cap atop his thick clay head, and his tiny red and orange engine huffing and puffing along the shiny steel rails, Barnes retained the trappings of a buffoon. For a brief moment Lyndon pictured the Barnes of childhood, rowing his little orange dinghy to Poseidon’s Grotto and reflected on his great voyage of discovery with Clarke so many long years before.

However, for the present, the adult Barnes rode his engine around the track, and it appeared he would be perpetually chasing his tail along the great circuit, following providence as if some all-knowing thing had pre-ordained it. Time after time, around and around he journeyed, always moving forward but ironically moving towards his original beginning.

It was as if the end of the ride was his start, and once the journey had begun anew, he had already crossed the cusp of its ending.

He rode the giant wheel which apparently led nowhere. Lyndon puzzled at the paradox. He began to wonder if the train somehow represented a soul struggling against the currents of fate. In a lost moment his thoughts began to contemplate Barnes’ predicament.

…‘What was the order of all things and was there a cosmic engineer?’

…‘Was there a circle of life and if so, was it already pre-ordained?’

…‘Could we control our own destiny?’

…‘Maybe what we think life is could be some kind of paradox, too!’

Years before, Lyndon had considered his own beginnings, the times in his life which marked some important change…some exciting new development along the formative track which progressed him towards maturity. Most of these he had eagerly hoped for, even expected in the flurry of youth; but now the quandary tormented him…if a life in truth was lived on an allegorical giant wheel, what happened at the end of the cycle? What happened when the wheel reached the cusp between the end of one rotation and the beginning of the next?

…And what of time itself?

At any point, so we are told, one exists within the moment and for the moment, but can this change the value of what was the past and what may become our future? Can a moment in time contain an eternity that cannot be breached by our current understanding of reality? If such conditions exist, it seems in a real sense we could traverse time by being at once in it and out of it. This surely is a contradiction worthy of Heraclitus.

Bewildered, Lyndon held his lovely wife’s hand tighter than ever before. ‘All this beauty and love cannot end,’ he thought, ‘and leave nothing but a memory and then not even that. How could that be possible?’

There is an Old Italian adage which advocates that we are all pieces in the great chess game of life, and at the end of that game, the king and the pawn alike, are placed neatly into the same box. Rich and poor, young and old all end in the same manner…but what of the next game?

Away in the distance, Barnes rattled and bumped along the uneven track, it seemed, perpetually advancing and receding in a continuous loop, neither advancing nor retreating, neither coming or going, inexorably moving forward from nowhere…to nowhere.

“Do you believe in forever, Helen?”

“Yes, I do.”

“What type of forever do you think we will have?”

“Is there only one?”

Lyndon looked into his wife’s eyes, surprised by her response. “What do you mean, Sweetheart?”

“I think that we live many different lives even within a single lifetime, don’t you agree?

“Well…I…”

“Look at it this way, there was a time when we lived as children, and a time when we grew up and times of joy and sadness in-between. There will be other times of change in the future. Who knows what may happen to you, or me, or us?”

“Yes, that’s right…but I don’t entirely see your point. Surely we are the sum of all the parts that make up our lives?”

“I agree, but there has to be more to it than that.”

“More than…?”

“Who’s to say that forever’s not lived in an instant of time; or forever may be some part of our lifetime lived over and over…or we may have many different lifetimes, past and present. Who’s to say how many other lifetimes we have, or indeed if we don’t exist simultaneously in several at once?”

“Other lifetimes…other places or dimensions? Let’s slow down a little. Where is all this coming from? Have you been watching Science Fiction Theatre, again?” Lyndon smirked at his somewhat serious wife.

“I suppose I’m just thinking out aloud. Strange, though, watching Graham go round and round makes a girl think that she is chasing her tail.”

Lyndon had to nod his head in agreement.

“It’s odd that you were thinking about Barnes in just that way. I must admit that I entertained similar thoughts. Remember our conversation about the grotto and how we thought we knew it from somewhere. I haven’t stopped thinking about that…”

“…And neither have I.”

“So, do you think we could have lived at an earlier time?”

“Maybe yes…and then, maybe no! I don’t know and who can tell?”

Lyndon grimaced and raised his eyebrows a little as Helen continued to explain her feelings.

“…But I feel that we have shared something good from the earliest time that I can remember you. Don’t you feel that, too, Lyndon?”

“Yes sweetheart, I know that there is, as you say, something…something that connects us…connecting us somehow away from our beginnings on the cove…but like you, I don’t know what that something is. Can you understand what I mean?”

Helen was clearly implicit to Lyndon’s meaning, but she too, could not explain the requisites. Along the track, Barnes’ journey had reached its pinnacle and he had begun to return to his starting point. It was then that Helen and Lyndon stood dumbfounded as they observed the signals on the side of the track.

Left and right, going and coming, red and green…and red and green and red and green and red…

“It’s those coloured lights again…the same ones that were at Somerset!”

“I see them, too.”

“They do mean something, Lyndon, don’t they?”

“It would seem that way…If only I could take hold of those lights and somehow make them tell us what the cryptic colours mean…If only they could speak to us!”

“Red…green…red…green…”

“From somewhere, some place, I know that…”

“…That they can tell us something that we should know about ourselves, probably something amazing?”

“Yes, that’s it. The lights are trying to tell us something…something important about us. If only we could understand them.”

“Maybe then, we would be able to understand our life together!”

“Maybe you’re right?”

“Red…green…red…green…”

“For the entire world, I wonder what they mean.”

“O golden Love, what life, what joy but thine?

Come death, when thou art gone, and make an end!

When gifts and tokens are no longer mine,

Nor the sweet intimacies of a friend.

These are the flowers of youth. But painful age

The bane of beauty, following swiftly on,

Wearies the heart of man with sad presage

And takes away his pleasure in the sun.

Hateful is he to maiden and to boy

And fashioned by the gods for our annoy.”

—Mimnermus

Somewhere, in another moment in time, a middle-aged Lyndon and Helen slowly walked along a different deserted beach. They paddled their feet through the wash of the sea, discussing family and friends, and art. They were good friends, unattached, and they revelled in the essence of the cool waters and in each other’s company, but they had lived their youthful lives with other people, who were now gone.

“Helen, the thought occurred that I would like to find a deserted beach, and comb it.”

“Like Gauguin, I suppose, Lyndon?”

“No, Helen, not at all. I want to comb it like me…like Lyndon Williams.”

In this version of Lyndon’s and Helen’s being, they were just good friends who had become acquainted in later life. Was this fated to be, or just dumb luck? They had not shared a history as young people growing up together. For them, the cove was not a special place and Poseidon’s Grotto had no meaning. In this life the good friends remained unattached and lived separate lives, indifferent even to the idea of the random power of destiny. If such power could ever exist, it must be love supreme that preordains how we travel along the currents of time. One could beg the question, if a marriage is consummated by love, how can you consummate a friendship?

The gentle wash of the beach ran up their legs as hand in hand, each in turn discussed their families and the obligations and expectations they owned to them. Each knew that whatever time they could share would be sparing. This Lyndon and Helen were two people who were living very different lives, but they both recognized a mutual longing in their hearts, and a loneliness eating away at their souls.

Here, like sand before the wind, two people blown together, who for a brief moment in time shared a transcendent love that was far greater than their consequence; and they dreamed of beauty rich and rare, of long delight in an opportune moment. They dreamed of a time when they could share the wonder of watching a deep, full moon rising over a calm Rhine, flecking its blue divinity off its still inky waters. Yet, for now it was a dream presently unfulfilled.

Since all divinity is but an aspect of love or wonder, may they find what they seek.

But what they seek today they will not find in this version of reality. Fate has robbed them their due…this time.

…This time?

Somewhere else within the Flux, the same two people walked along a deserted beach, experiencing that perfect moment when worlds collide, not in anguish, but in love. They were no longer young and had lived out their youth and young adulthood with other people. Their lives combined as a random, happy meeting in a moment of time, but within such moments, mountains can be moved and the seas drunk dry. For them, a romantic Rhine moon will one day shine in subliminal wonder. Their pleasure is as one, singular in purpose, borne along on a solitary current within the stream of their being, carried along to whatsoever divine providence decrees.

In this reality, for the time being, Lyndon and Helen’s world is perfect, but in the infinite number of parallel realities within the Flux, there also exists other perfect moments. Their souls seemingly flit from one possibility to another. Nothing is fixed in time or space. They exist everywhere and nowhere.

They exist within a dream, an eternal dream…and the poet says that it takes but one perfect moment for the world to listen and sing!

“The thought has just occurred to me that I ’d like to paint you,” Lyndon enthusiastically addressed his wife as they returned to the car from their visit to the Plantation in yet another version of reality.

“Is there an artist in you saying that?”

“Yes…An artist, certainly!”

“A good artist, I would imagine?”

“Indeed, I think so!”

“So you would rather paint then say, sculpt?”

“Yes, I would.”

“And the reason for that would be?”

“Because I can’t think of a happier medium to portray your beauty…”

“And is there anything else you would desire?”

“You mean other than making love to you?”

“This time, most ardently, yes!”

“Well, I ’d also like to find a quiet beach and comb it.”

“Like, the painter, Paul Gauguin I suppose?”

“No…Like me!”

In this dream, Lyndon and Helen’s world had synchronized to the rhythm of their heartbeats. Their souls, like drifting grains of sand borne by contrary currents, had ultimately connected together through the limitless combinations of what could be. They were lovers now, and forever, but elsewhere they had been lovers, too…and there had been times and places long before what we consider to be the present, where circumstances had not permitted a union of their souls.

There are other worlds parallel to their perfect place, some good…and some, not so good, and each variation just a small current within the universal stream of being. Most importantly, no matter which guises they lived, or what names they answered to, their spirits remained their own. Their spirits were and remain eternal, forever existing and searching throughout what we call ‘time’ for the essence of the other. Their love for one another is the constant that constituted the primal stuff of their universe. Their undying love remains for all eternity the primal essence…

Their dream was as real to them as life itself.

By our poor reckoning, in the here and now, they presently walk along a different beach, hand in hand, confident that this singular and particular reality will never end. In this world, Lyndon had forgotten how, in another version of his life, he had grown old mourning for a lost love. Helen had been tragically killed in a car wreck. But today, they are young again in their perfect utopian world, as they had once been in a forgotten past.

Presently, in this idyllic life, Lyndon and Helen contemplate destiny in a way they had never realised before…

…and in a way that they could never have imagined.

Despite this, as the saying goes, beyond all things incomprehensible under the bright yellow sun, maybe some omnipotent entity granted them another chance…or was their time just a random throw of the dice in a never ending game with no beginning and no end?

Together, now and forever, they plunge along the allegorical wave that eternally crashes to shore, dashing the grains of sand that were and are their lives, and then as quickly retreating back into an oblivious sea.

…Time after time?

…Or worlds within worlds…existing within the deepest recesses of the mind…

…Within the Flux…

It is still possible, even in the modern world, for one to assume that time as a continuum is contradictory. We are conditioned to believe in the past, the present and the future, but in doing so, we are at any instant at once in time and out of it. Our understanding of ‘time’ therefore is the acknowledgement of the sequelae of a purely existential order imposed upon us by convention. Heraclitus believed that everything was ‘fire,’ and as such constantly changing (in flux). As such the concept of time is not unchanging law and it could be argued that all things exist at once, where past and present were but points of reference that could be as interchangeable as the mind decreed. The past, present and future could simultaneously overlap just as fire changes its shape, which by its nature, can never be repeated exactly again.

Through the travail of ages myriad grains of sand, had been borne by the currents of time. Two such grains, millennia ago (by our estimation, over 3200 years) started a journey that would cross oceans of time…

In ancient Argos…so long ago, the wheel began to turn.

Argos was a city-state, dry and hot and prone to drought. It was a land of sheep and goats and oxen. The terrain paled green under the cultivation of olive groves, and flax, and wild horta. High above the parched landscape, blue skies mirrored the jewelled sea where the great Lord Poseidon, chief amongst the gods, held court and the people paid him homage or paid a terrible price. Poseidon’s retribution was well known to the Argive people. He was feared equally by princes and peasants.

Beyond the sea, to the south the New Kingdom of Egypt flourished. Farther to the east, the Vast Hittite Empire, of which Troy was a part and the kingdoms of the Mitanni and Assyria, controlled most of the known world. Achaea-land, in which Argos was just one of many military states, spread throughout central and southern Greece.

This ancient land was peopled by heroes who fought with bronze weapons and their steadfast women. They lived in the countryside adjoining the great stone fortresses which surveyed kingdoms carved out of the rocky landscape and protected by the gods of the sea and the chthonic goddesses of the earth.

Argos was a hard and violent place where life expectancy was short and wars between other states, frequent. Great kings held even greater powers, seemingly divine to the population of peasants and serfs who scratched a living from the dry land and supported the fighting aristocratic elite.

Honour was all important to the warrior class and heroes fought not just for glory, but also for Kalos thanatos, a ‘beautiful death.’ A fundamental reason for living was to die well. Only when a warrior could garner glory, was he worthy enough to be sung about by the bards.

This was once Lyndon and Helen’s world, where these two young aristocrats fell in love and lived their short lives…and died…but for the present, they had forgotten this. They had forgotten how so very long ago they were two different people, living under different guises, living completely different lives.

Yet the essence of their souls remained inviolate…but in each incarnation, within the mind’s eye, a vague memory stirred of this other place and time.